Prof Frederic Kaplan holds the Digital Humanities Chair at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and directs the EPFL Digital Humanities Lab. He conducts research projects combining archive digitisation, information modelling and museographic design. He is currently working on the « Venice Time Machine », an international project in collaboration with the Ca’Foscari University in Venice, aiming to model the evolution and history of Venice over a 1000 year period.

Frederic Kaplan graduated as an engineer of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications in Paris and received a PhD degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University Paris VI. Before coming to Switzerland, he worked ten years as a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory contributing in particular to the AIBO robot. Then he worked six years at CRAFT, the EPFL pedagogical research laboratory.

He published more than a hundred scientific papers, 6 books and about 10 patents. His inventions and devices have been exhibited in several museums including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Artin New York. He is also the founder and president of OZWE, a company that designs and produces innovative interfaces and consumer electronic products and of bookapp.com, a joint venture focusing on digital publications.

1999: Regular travels to Tokyo to work with Sony japanese teams on the conception of novel entertainment robots. Collaboration with Adam Miklosi and Eniko Kubinyi, ethologists of theEotvos Lorand University in Budapest.

2001: Publication of La naissance d’une langue chez les robots

2002: Research with Pierre-Yves Oudeyer on artificial curiosity. Collaboration with developmental psychologists.

2005: Publication of Les machines apprivoisées (Selected as one of the best popular science book of the year for the Roberval price)

2005: Collaboration with Martino d’Esposito, industrial designer and ECAL students on the project : A robot’s playroom.

2006: Co-chair of the Epigenetic Robotics Conference in Paris.

2006: Invited by Pierre Dillenbourg, Frederic Kaplan supervises a new team on interactive furniture and robotic objects inside the CRAFT center at EPFL.

2007: Publication of Futur 2.0 (Fyp editions)

2007: Chief-editor of Frontiers in Neurorobotics

2008: Presentation of Wizkid at the MoMA in New York.

2008: Foundation of OZWE with industrial designer Martino d’Esposito
2009: Presentation of QB1, a new kind of personal computer.

2009: Publication of La métamorphose des objets

2010: Launch of Bookapp.com, with Laurent Bolli and Cristiana Freitas.